Re: [QUERY] Why do we have git-completion.zsh?

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 20, 2013, 22:39 UTC
Message-ID: <CAMP44s3yCW-pHVHc9WfL1BC7BKmnXxZ1WQyPRAMnx967=74_Kg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20130420185329.GB8586@elie.Belkin>

On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 1:53 PM, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 21 quoted lines

> Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>> Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:
>
>>>                             However, I don't understand why we
>>> maintain it, because there's a comprehensive first-class completer in
>>> ZSH core [1] which I use all the time.  Shouldn't the completion folks
>>> be contributing to this instead?
>>
>> Only if they want to.
> [...]
>> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/210022/focus=210024
>
> Sorry, wrong link.  Here's a better one:
>
> http://www.zsh.org/mla/workers/2011/msg00497.html
>
> More fundamentally, your question seems to assume some kind of shared
> plan regarding what people work on, rather than each person choosing
> to work on what they consider valuable without having to justify it to
> others.  I am very happy with Felipe's work on git's completion code
> and don't think it does any harm to efforts elsewhere.

To complement the reason; the zsh folks (or perhaps it's only one; who works on the git stuff), absolutely prioritize "correctness" over speed, that means if it takes ten seconds to list all the possible files to complete, grouped nicely, that's exactly what they'll do, instead of the way the bash completion does, which lists the most likely files, which takes milliseconds.

I found zsh's completion unbearably slow, which is ironic; git is the fastest DSCM on Earth, and they blow the performance away by making the completion dead slow, to the point where the completion is several orders of magnitude slower than the actual command. To me, the whole point of the completion is to make the work faster, and if the completion takes longer than me typing it, what's the point of it?

And I'm not the only one, when I contributed this stuff to oh-my-zsh[1] I got a very positive response.

I couldn't convince them of this obvious fact, so I choose git's bash fast completion.

I have patches to improve the zsh thin wrapper to give more information, zsh style, in a way that is superior to zsh's git completion, but I'm still not happy with them, I want the user to be able to configure the output so it's not totally bloated like in zsh, and I'm still working on it. In the mean time, I want my completion to be blazingly fast, and at least as good as git's bash completion.

If they wanted my contributions, that would be awesome, but that doesn't appear to be the case. And I'm kind of relieved, because zsh's completion is monstrous code, and the zsh development practices are not good (e.g. all my logically independent patches get squashed into one commit).

Cheers.

[1] https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh

-- 
Felipe Contreras